Telluric Texts, Implicate Spaces, Mattessich

[Jane]

The America into which Mason and Dixon penetrate by way of
marking a boundary and defining an  orientation (a westward
"Vector of Desire," as narrator Wicks Cherrycoke puts it) is
no ordinary "place" in the sense that this means delimited
or enclosed, ordered according to principles of extension,
causality and isotropy--in a word, Newtonian space. Pynchon
proceeds not from a notion of coexistence (where each
object, point or locus in space is externalized with respect
to every other) but rather of palimpsests and Moebius
strips, invisible Ley-lines and parallel universes. Pynchon
offers perhaps his most ingenious metaphor for this America
in the quartz prisms that Mason and Dixon place on the
marker stones along the Line. These crystals disclose under
a microscope "a fine structure of tiny cells, each a Sphere
with another nested concentrickally within,  much like Fish
Roe in appearance" (547). Nested inside such nested
structures is what the expedition's "Quartz-scryer" Mr.
Everybeet calls a "'Ghost,' another Crystal inside the
ostensible one, more or less clearly form'd" (547). Mr.
Everybeet explains: 

         "'Tis there the Pictures appear . . . tho' it
varies from one
         Operator to the next,--some need a perfect deep
Blank, and cannot
         scry in Ghost-Quartz. Others, before too much
Clarity, become
         blind to the other World . . . my own Crystal,"--he
searches his
         Pockets and produces a Hand-siz'd Specimen with a
faint Violet
         tinge,--"the Symmetries are not always easy to see
. . . here,
         these twin Heptagons . . . centering your Vision
upon their
         Common side, gaze straight in,--" "Aahhrrhh!" Mason
recoiling and
         nearly casting away the crystal. 

         "Huge, dark Eyes?" the Scryer wishes to know. 

         "Aye.--Who is it?" Mason knows. (442) 

     The face that Mason sees in the crystal inside the
crystal "varies from one Operator to the next" according to
who it is he or she wishes to see or is haunted by (in
Mason's case, this will be his dead wife Rebekah, whose eyes
in fact he does "know" in thecrystal). The doubly
crystalline prisms that mark the Mason and Dixon Line, that
mark the mark of boundary and location in Mason & Dixon,
contain representations of "other Worlds" than the
"ostensible one." This spectral investiture of desire in the
objects by which "place" is established clearly indicates a
fundamental strategy of the novel to fold desire and the
object, the time that desire actualizes and the space that
the object  defines, into one textual (but also telluric)
surface. "Time is the Space that may not be seen," says
Dixon's childhood teacher Emerson, and for Pynchon it is the
invisible world that dwells in matter (quite literally, it
turns out later in the novel, invaginated into the earth)
and that can be seen after all (for Mason in fact sees it),
so long as perception finds the right balance between
opacity (the "deep Blank") and transparency ("too much
Clarity"), the variable point of visual acuity that can
never be fixed. 


"The cosmos is a living organism, which renews itself
periodically." 

				Mircea Eliade, The Sacred AND The Profane